The exhibit is open from October 7, 2014, each weekdays 8-19h.

Admission is free!

Mehrdad Garousi was born in 1985 and grew up in Hamadan, which is a historical city in the west of Iran. From childhood, he was surrounded by people from different religious trends like Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Bahaism and their related spiritual traditions and rituals and also lighter shades from other eastern tendencies like Buddhism, Hinduism, and Chinese philosophy. He started art by participating in a local professional gallery of Hamadan at the age of 12. Having learned different techniques of oil color, watercolor, pastel, colored pencil, charcoal, drawing, …, he was also employed by the same gallery as a young trainer, beside still receiving more professional training. His presence there lasted for a period of about 7 years. Finding school boring and useless, he left formal education at the last year of high school. After years of devoting his life specially to oil color and watercolor painting, he finally got fed up with traditional mediums and started a long search for a better way of grasping creativity. His brain was full of conceptions but he could not find any clue in his art.

He got concerned with trying capacities of digital graphics and illustration and also digital photography for a compact period of 5 years. Following his interests in science, space, spiritual experiences and relative artworks on the web, all of a sudden, he encountered a very new type of digital art full of complexity and bearing high amounts of illusion and psychedelism, called fractal art, in 2005. He thought he found the transdisciplinary medium that could make bridges between all his tendencies, so he renewed his artistic activity with planar fractals. Not too much later, he found spatial fractals full of new possibilities completely different from those of the whole world around. He found it a medium directly based on day’s technological findings, originated from modern mathematics of fractals, presenting worlds completely far from the boredom of everyday life, answering to his adventurous soul and representing visual experiences of the spirituality the human race has always been looking for for millennia.

Spatial fractals provided a digital medium through which he could travel in the world of unknowns, a world that is completely unknown and needs to be explored and discovered. A world the creator of which has permission to make changes in it and in other words a private digital spiritual world in which the traveler and the creator are the same person. Mehrdad found large amounts of aesthetics in the discovery of these unknown digital worlds belonging to other dimensions. In parallel with fractal image making, he also worked on the scientific side of the field. All his activities in the last 10 years have resulted in participation in more than 30 exhibitions around the world and the publication of more than 30 papers in this regard. He has also received a Second Degree of Artistry (honorary Master of Fine Arts degree) from the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance of Iran recently. One of the impressive consequences of this type of fractals is 3D animations that are 3D psychedelic expeditions inside fractal environments that help viewers to engage in and experience the mathematical psychedelism themselves.

Two of Mehrdad’s Sp fractal animations are music videos for musicians Flinch and The Ntity. Such music videos play role as visual bridges between pure modern mathematics on one side and postmodern music on the other side. Flying in fractal environments is similar to space expeditions into unknown worlds, but digitally. They are so real that Mehrdad as an explorer sometimes expects to find clues of aliens there inside the complex structures, though they have a digital entity and only exist inside computers. Mehrdad finds fractals an intersection of human ambitions for unknown worlds, space expeditions, digital explorations and on the whole all adventurous feeling of human kind looking for strangeness.

Ars GEometrica Gallery, Eger

“Every signal has a mathematical character.” (Lajos Szabó)

The Ars GEometrica Conferences and Workshops were started in 2007. Our mission is to draw attention to interactions and border-crossings between art, science and education and to promote the development of creative thinking, intellectual curiosity together with aesthetic sensibilities. In 2011 September, as a result of our cooperation with the Eszterházy Károly College of Eger City (Hungary), we established the first art-science-education gallery in the region as an experimental space to present the interplay between these fields in terms of opening – with regard to freedom of research, learning and self-expression. Our aim is to evoke the traditional and contemporary values of art and science to become vivid community values.